Political Identity Crisis

I wonder what kind of crazy answers one has to give to be far right and authoritarian, about where Trump, Bush, Cruz and Rubio are on this chart: So I'm going to pretend I'm a right-wing wacko and take the test again. I'll be giving what I think are the furthest right and authoritarian answers. The questions that seem absolutely crazy when answered in that way I record here:

• Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races: Strongly agree
• It is regrettable that many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society: Strongly disagree
• The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders: Strongly agree
• The rich are too highly taxed: Strongly agree
• Those with the ability to pay should have the right to higher standards of medical care: Strongly agree
• Abortion, when the woman's life is not threatened, should always be illegal: Strongly agree
• An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: Strongly agree
• All people have their rights, but it is better for all of us that different sorts of people should keep to their own kind: Strongly agree
• People with serious inheritable disabilities should not be allowed to reproduce: Strongly agree
• Abstract art that doesn't represent anything shouldn't be considered art at all: Strongly agree
• In criminal justice, punishment should be more important than rehabilitation: Strongly agree
• It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate some criminals: Strongly agree
• Astrology accurately explains many things: Strongly agree
• You cannot be moral without being religious: Strongly agree
• Sex outside marriage is usually immoral: Strongly agree
• Pornography, depicting consenting adults, should be legal for the adult population: Strongly disagree
• What goes on in a private bedroom between consenting adults is no business of the state: Strongly disagree
• No one can feel naturally homosexual: Strongly agree
• These days openness about sex has gone too far: Strongly agree

This wacko's political compass:Economic Left/Right: 7.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 9.54Gee, the wacko scored about the same as the Republican candidates, just a little above Trump's dot on the chart. It's scary that not only are all the Republican candidates crammed up in the far right corner, but Hillary is pretty far into that quadrant, too.The only candidate with a score that reflects a pattern of fairly moderate answers is Bernie Sanders. Maybe I should give him a closer look. Living in New Hampshire next door to Vermont where Bernie was governor I feel I already have a good understanding of his policy proposals. He seemed well intentioned, but I always thought I detected the bit of the crazy about him with qualities similar to Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader, a crazy that wasn't dangerous because he was only a governor.I failed to score a 10/10. I wonder what answers I would have to change to score 10/10.--Percy

I wish you hadn't done that, Percy.Pretty scary.....

I was going to try the same thing as you Percy; mainly because after seeing most people's results, I thought perhaps the test might be 'skewed' to the left regardless of responses. Apparently, I was wrong.It is pretty frightening to see how some of these politicians view the world and themselves.

I think it'd be this one:

• Astrology accurately explains many things: Strongly agree

Try a strongly disagree on that one; hard-core Christians know that Astrology comes from Satan.

Oh, yes, that makes sense.But then maybe this question isn't a differentiator for left/right or libertarian/authoritarian. Many who know a little science would also answer "strongly disagree", right along with the deeply religious.--Percy

Well also, Astrology is some liberal hippie bullshit so I figure strongly disagreeing with it should push you to the right You lacked more right-ness than authoritarian-ness and that's the one that jumped out at me to get you more to the right, and maybe also a little upwards too.

Economic Left/Right: -2.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.69I actually did it twice. The first time, my scores were wildly left/libertarian, but I think I was listening to a nagging, peer-pressure-y voice that comes from being mostly surrounded by liberal-minded friends and colleagues. So, I tried it again, making an effort to separate my personal feelings from the peer-pressure voice, and ended up with that result above.It still "feels" inaccurate to me, but I don't know why.I found a lot of the questions somewhat less easy to answer than in other quizzes I've taken. Sometimes, such as the question about "protectionism in trade," I just don't know what the terminology means. In others, I don't feel like I have the experience to say, such as the question about "first-generation immigrants being fully integrated." In others, I'm not entirely sure what I'm being asked. For example, I have many concerns about multinational agrochemical corporations, but "unethically exploiting the plant genetic resources of developing countries" doesn't sound like an accurate description of my concerns. In fact, it sounds kind of pseudo-sciencey to me.I also feel like some questions tried to force me into a box that I didn't want to be in. For example, on the question about whether businessmen and manufacturers are more important than writers or artists, my feelings about writers and artists are quite different. So, being forced to group writers and artists made my answer feel uncomfortable and unnatural to me.Overall, it felt kind of arcane and uninformative to me.

Maybe, but that reasoning did not stop Nancy Ronald from consulting charts during Ronald's presidency.

Hillary may be in that quadrant, but I don't believe she would answer most (or at least many) of those questions as indicated in your post. In particular, the questions about sex, abortion, segregation, homosexuality, and taxes don't jibe with what she says during campaign speeches, and I'm not going to speculate on how sincere she is about what she says.So where do you get Ms. Clinton's score from? If your position is accurate, there must be other ways to be authoritarian other than by giving your answers. If true, I think that undercuts the point of your post.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

The website had a chart, there's a copy at the top of my message.I think you're right to question that website's charting of the candidates views. Shifting them all by around -5/-5 might be closer to the truth.--Percy

Maybe her position is correctly charted, but I doubt that the website has had Clinton answer their quiz or that they have correctly plotted how she would have answered their quiz. They are assigning her position based on a completely different evaluation. I have no idea how they reached their conclusions.

They couldn't have tested the Republican candidates either, right? When you look at some of the questions it's hard for me to imagine any of them scoring that high on the "wacko" element. Maybe not hard for some here to imagine, but very hard for me to imagine.I expected to score a lot higher on the Right than I did, and am surprised I came out so far from those Republicans. That could be due to the fact that many of those ARE wacko questions that don't describe many on the Right. I don't think I've been peer-pressured more toward the Left, or if so I would think it would be a very minor effect on such a test, I would just have expected to line up more with, say, Cruz, and I didn't. I think they must have taken a few quotes from them here and there and invented all the rest to make up their "score" on their test.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That's exactly right. You are confirming the exact point I made to Percy. We cannot predict how anyone would answer those questions based on where we put them on the chart.On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Ted Cruz, for example would match a huge number of the positions Percy selected for him. He might waffle on the strongly agree vs agree, but I think Percy nailed his description and that of some of his fellow Republicans. There is a reason why I challenged him primarily on the basis of Hilary.

Hi, Faith. Peer pressure influencing Faith? I doubt it. I think one big issue is that they define "Left" and "Right" in an unorthodox way, so most of us don't have a very good sense of where we're supposed to fit on this political space. They also use their own "estimation" of political candidates, so there's a real possibility that political bias inserted a lot of pessimism or optimism into certain estimates.Also, I'm uncomfortable about the fact that the people behind this test haven't voluntarily identified themselves and have apparently cloistered their methodology behind a copyright.I'm calling foul on the Political Compass test.

Of course we disagree on this. If you were right about how the Republicans would score, then I should have scored up there with them and I didn't.